Building on the capabilities of its well-established Sensing Core tire monitoring system, Sumitomo Rubber Industries has introduced technology to allow for tread wear assessment.
The system is already equipped to record tire pressures, load and road conditions, however, by harvesting data such as wheel speed, engine load and other parameters from a vehicle’s systems, Sumitomo says it is now able to calculate tire wear levels.
The Japanese tire and rubber company notes that the development is software based, and as such does not require the use of additional sensors beyond those that its tires and most vehicles are already equipped with. Using processing algorithms, along with digital filters, to ascertain wheel speed signals from the tire (rather than a vehicle’s sensors) the system is able to determine tread rigidity, which varies over time depending on wear levels. It says it is only able to achieve this thanks to comprehensive data on its tires, as the process relies on accurate characterization of each tire model and size.
Equipped with this data, the system can alert drivers when it is necessary to rotate or replace tires and thanks to data being stored on the cloud, fleet managers can also be kept abreast of conditions to facilitate preventative maintenance.
